Yonhap
4/6/2007
South Korea sent $400,000 in cash to North Korea Friday via the country’s Red Cross officials to help the North purchase computers and other supplies for video-link reunions of families between the two Koreas, officials said.
This is the first time for the Seoul government to send cash aid to the communist North, though bilateral trade exceeded $1 billion for the second consecutive year last year.
“Officials from the National Red Cross left for North Korea Thursday on a boat, carrying funds for the North’s video reunion center,” an official from the Ministry of Unification told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The boat carrying the South Korean officials, as well as 50 construction trucks promised to the impoverished North as aid for its flood damages last year, left Incheon on Friday.
The boat arrived at the North’s Nampo Port earlier Friday, according to ministry officials.
The money is to be used to purchase computers and TV monitors needed for the special kind of reunions between separated families via video conferencing.
North and South Korea have held more than a dozen rounds of face-to-face reunions since the historic inter-Korean summit in 2000, involving over 10,000 people from both sides.
However, over 90,000 South Koreans remain separated from their loved ones in the North since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
“We had no choice (but to give cash) because we could not provide actual goods,” most of which are prohibited from entering the communist nation under the U.S. law on the control of strategic goods, an official said.
